However, US case law, as I understand it, states that Twitter does have freedom of association. Hence abominations like Citizens United.

The abomination here is the comparison. Organizations surely must be able to express speech on behalf of the interests of their members. Yeah, there should be limits, but this implication goes way too far. We need organizations, advocacy groups and yes, even for-profit corporations, as leverage for speech; to efficiently participate in democracy. What we don't need is a limitless dollar amount of campaign finance funneled through a shell.

Originally Posted by Sini

Originally Posted by rhaikh

Holding political ideology can't be separated from action : advocacy. It is the nature of political ideology, you believe the system should change (or stay the same) to reflect your beliefs. To invoke protection under holding an ideology, I believe you are also invoking advocacy for that ideology.

I want to come back to this, because I can hope to change your mind. For example, if I were to believe that Earth would be better off without humans, could this belief be separated from action of committing indiscriminate genocide? Before you object that this is fictitious, I have actually met people that hold such beliefs. They tend to be eco-types and pacifists. They are extremely unlikely to carry any kind of violence, less mass genocide. As their action, they tend to not have children.

So we have belief, and we have action and they don't line up. You are asserting that we should treat political ideology (a type of belief) as it were realized action. To me this is not a coherent position due to following: belief and action often diverge - say one thing and do another, one can act on belief to a vastly different degree - there is difference between true believer and hanger-on, the same ideology can translate to different values - conservatism is fiscal for one group of people and social for another.

I agree that you can argue for something and not actually believe it, demonstration of this litters the forum. The difference in my quoted opinion here is twofold: when you then use that ideology as a shield under an antidiscrimination law, and when that ideology's purpose is to effect systemic change.

In your genocidal example, even you begin to admit that genocide is not the actual policy they are advocating for, just some hypothetical ideal. Even the way you phrased it suggests this: "Earth would be better off without humans" not "Humans must be annihilated for the benefit of Earth." Not even murder is actually on their agenda. "Fewer children per family" might be a more realistic policy they would advocate for. That is the difference between effecting systemic change as a political ideology, and fantasy. We seemed to already agree that affiliation was an appropriate compromise to help resolve this. A written party platform doesn't leave much ambiguity between policy advocacy and fantasy.

Originally Posted by Sini

There are other workable approaches. Regulating social media as a common carrier. Defining public spaces in digital realm.

I was glad to debate these approaches but I let you choose the one you found most favorable to your argument first. These essentially are an extended debate of #1 as I identified it. My interest in maintaining this conversation is to demonstrate the reasonable extent of your complaints about "censorship," and hopefully to not have to engage any further outside of this realm. The short preview of my argument against these approaches as a "solution for censorship" is that they require even higher standards of proof and governmental suppression of speech just to maintain your examples.

So long as we're revisiting generic positions, I hope you now have a new appreciation for the word "censorship." It seems to me that the government / judiciary generally advocates on behalf of the freedom of expression of citizens as a default and with the intention of maintaining speech to the greatest extent possible. I simply don't see any arguments for #1 that follow this precedent. That is the real road to censorship and governmental overreach.

However, US case law, as I understand it, states that Twitter does have freedom of association. Hence abominations like Citizens United.

The abomination here is the comparison. Organizations surely must be able to express speech on behalf of the interests of their members.

Can you enumerate other fictitious and imaginary entities that you believe should have right of speech? What about auto-dialers? What about bots? What about voices schizophrenic people hear?

You are very far from having me convinced that corporations should have freedom of speech. You can't hand-wave away Citizens United, it happened as a direct result of such views that you are also advocating. You need to address this before we can move forward.

However, US case law, as I understand it, states that Twitter does have freedom of association. Hence abominations like Citizens United.

The abomination here is the comparison. Organizations surely must be able to express speech on behalf of the interests of their members.

Can you enumerate other fictitious and imaginary entities that you believe should have right of speech? What about auto-dialers? What about bots? What about voices schizophrenic people hear?

You are very far from having me convinced that corporations should have freedom of speech. You can't hand-wave away Citizens United, it happened as a direct result of such views that you are also advocating. You need to address this before we can move forward.

Do I?

I told you I'm against Citizens United because essentially I disagree that unlimited money should be spent on political campaigns.

Maybe you can start us off here and explain why we shouldn't have worker's unions.

Afraid so. You have to reconcile that your arguments for why Twitter should be able to censor anyone they please are essentially the same arguments that were used in Citizens United.

The problem with assigning corporations with these kind of rights is that freedom of speech also means freedom of political donations.

When I say "corporations should not have freedom of speech" this does not mean that they should be prevented from any kind of speech. This simply means that corporate speech shouldn't be treated as a right, as such it can't be used to justify impeding rights of actual humans. This way when there is a human vs. corporation (or union), humans would automatically win.

I don't see an inherent conflict in limiting financial campaign contributions (by individuals or corporations or whatever) and freedom of speech.

I recommend you look into arguments in Citizens United case - they successfully used argument that political donations is type of expression, limiting these would limit freedom of speech.

That goes back to definition of freedom of speech. Wouldn't you agree that freedom of speech is not possible unless it also includes expression of political opinions? Also wouldn't you agree that freedom of speech isn't limited to act of speaking, but rather to all types of transactional communications. That is, it isn't only act of speaking (after all we hardly said a word in this entire debate, we typed it). You could artificially exclude money, but then it still leaves offering services, press coverage, advertising, advocacy...

To definitively kill that argument you need to categorically dismiss the notion that freedom of speech applies to non-human entities. Dismiss doesn't mean forbid, it only means that it isn't protected in any way. Corporations are just proxies for collective action of group of people. In case of speech, each corporate stakeholder has his or her own ability to speak. The same goes for unions. Ideas don't require collective bargaining or pooling of resources to realize it, so there is no need to give imaginary entities actual rights like that.

I recommend you look into arguments in Citizens United case - they successfully used argument that political donations is type of expression, limiting these would limit freedom of speech.

That goes back to definition of freedom of speech.

It goes back to Buckley v Valeo, which I also disagree with. Limits on speech are sometimes necessary to protect speech. For example if you go to your city council to provide testimony on an issue, your time will be limited - this is because the time of the council is also limited, and reasonable time needs to be provided to all comers. This limitation is a protection of your right to speak. If another system applied, such as if the time were instead auctioned off, your speech would even more limited based on your access to wealth. This is the situation we now face ourselves in because of the decisions in Buckley and Citizens. In the interest of protecting campaigns from being corrupted by the influence of money, I believe expenditures on behalf of a campaign should be extremely limited, regardless of source, and perhaps fully and equally funded by a general pool from tax revenue.

My argument is at best tangential to corporate personhood and demonstrates the overreach of Citizens. I would be ecstatic "artificially" exclude money and work from there.

If you have limits on speech, then you no longer have free speech, so "to protect speech" is not a valid justification for such action. Limits on speech are sometimes necessary to protect other rights.

To steelman your argument:

Limits on contributions in context of politics are necessary, because protection of democratic principles in a society is more important that any one's individual freedom of speech. That is, if you are using your immense wealth to corrupt "one person one vote" principle, then it is a question of rights of many individuals vs. rights of one individual. This doesn't change the fact that it is still censorship.

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Still, I would like you to address how your arguments for social media corporations' right to censor political views on their platform is categorically different from logic used to pass Citizens united.

Is online bullying of writers who transgress against “social justice” norms a form of censorship? Some scoff at the notion, arguing that “anti-SJW” commentators are actually the ones attacking a basic form of free speech: criticism of a book. But there is a massive difference between criticism and public shaming. A collective attack that includes such declarations as, “[R]acist ass writers, like Amélie Wen Zhao … you’re going to be held accountable” is less criticism than a show trial.

The notion that books can cause “harm” if they don’t handle identity issues in accordance with ideological diktat is a prescription for censorship no matter how that censorship is carried out.

On the bright side, this ugly episode may serve as a wake-up call for a number of liberals who think “social justice” culture is fundamentally benign despite a few excesses. Between the censorship-by-pressure and the public vilification of young female minority immigrant, this scandal is not a good look for the identitarian Left.